THEATER CHRONICLE
DISGUST AND DI SENCHANTMENT:
NEW BRITI SH AND AMERICAN PLAYS
When Big Daddy in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
asks his son,
Brick, why he drinks, the answer, teasingly withheld until another drink
is offered, finally comes forth as DISGUST) in large type. Big Daddy,
exasperated, shouts back in bold type, DISGUST WITH WHAT? Of course,
Brick isn't truly suffering from disgust at all, but from a wan, sex–
appealy, soaking, local-color
disenchantment.
When Archie Rice in
The Entertainer
says, "All my life I've been
searching for something. I've been searching for a draught Bass you
can drink all evening without running off every ten minutes, that you
can get drunk on without feeling sick, and all for fourpence," he is ex–
pressing a loathing for life that includes himself, his work, his family,
England, sex, history, the future. This disgust is so objective, indeed so
reasonable)
given the way Osborne sees his character's plight, that
Archie-whiny, sordid, dank hair parted in the middle-has none of that
surreptitious emotional appeal with which the stage and films allow their
stars to decorate the homeliness of a downbeat role. There is usually a
diamond sparkling somewhere about-if only the diamond-brightness of
the capped teeth. In the Osborne play, the audience, dismayed by the
completeness of Archie's repellent aspect, reminds itself that this coarse,
spermy creature is really Laurence Olivier and it is only acting. Thus
the humdrum vileness, the familiar measliness may be allowed as "enter–
tainment." Disenchantment will usually deal with the outrageous, the
mysterious, the hurt, the elegiac; and disgust will be bare, ordinary, cir–
cumstantial. ''Thank God, I'm normal!" the priest of disgust sings
in
The Entertainer.
Disenchantment is the current manufacture of the American thea–
ter. Why can't people really communicate with each other? Why must
everything be ugly? Why can't we think of others? And the answers
come back, flushed with the tears of the ingenue. Moods of disappoint–
ment, dreamy and bitter-sweet, utterly, fiercely private, are the foun–
dation of the plots in Tennessee Williams and William Inge. Yearnings,
nostalgic reveries, the blight of childhood, hidden vices-these are the
subjects of American theater as Shaw said that clandestine adultery
was
